Major Australian Banks, US Airlines Briefly Hit By Widespread Internet Outages (reuters.com) 21
Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States were briefly down on Thursday, in the second major blackout in just over a week caused by a glitch in an important piece of internet infrastructure. From a report: Server-related glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai had hampered services at Australian banks, while many U.S. airlines, including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, also reported an hour-long outage. The disruption linked to technical issues at Akamai follows an outage at rival Fastly that affected a number of popular websites last week. The impacted platform is now up and running, an Akamai spokesperson said, adding that the company was "continuing to validate services." The outage was caused by a bug in Akamai's software that has since been fixed, and was not caused by a cyber-attack or vulnerability, the spokesperson added.
Conspiracy Theory (Score:1)
If you want a conspiracy theory, try this on: Bank access was a shut down so that people in Australia could not take advantage of the recent drop in precious metal prices (gold/silver).
As I said - theory only.
Re: (Score:2)
...in the second major blackout in just over a week caused by a glitch in an important piece of internet infrastructure.
Ever notice this never happens to unimportant pieces of the internet.
Re: Conspiracy Theory (Score:2)
Pretty sure it happens all the time but no one cares.
Re: (Score:2)
Ever notice this never happens to unimportant pieces of the internet.
This is absolutely not true; /. has outages all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Retail Banks in Australia don't provide bullion purchase facilities to people.
For example, if you want to buy bullion you can walk into Perth Mint and buy silver/gold/platinum bullion on the spot. Every day there are people walking in buying/selling ounce bars etc.
And that is a Government run entity [Australia has weird quasi-govt entities which are run as limited companies but are 100% owned by the State Government and regulated by them. It sounds rubbish but works surprisingly well].
In practice people buy precious metals via bank (Score:2)
Retail Banks in Australia don't provide bullion purchase facilities to people.
Technically true, but I heard a report on Twitter from someone who couldn't buy silver online today, because the ACH (or whatever they have in Australia) connection from the bullion dealer to their checking account wouldn't work.
Most precious metals sites have lower rates for people paying in cash and thus also offer ways to pull directly from checking accounts when paying for purchases. You can still technically buy with a CC b
Once again we are centralizing too much (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
One day we will be one bug away from a total worldwide outage.
...says the forgetful human living through a global pandemic where entire industries are still shuttered over a year later.
(Sssh, keep it down. Sure as hell don't want that dumb guy named Wall Street to get a clue...he still thinks we beat this last April, two weeks and all...)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah another content delivery network provider (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
glitch! mmmm Why several occurrences now?
You're asking why criminal activity has increased, during a worldwide pandemic where entire industries are still shuttered, and legitimate sources of income, have been decimated globally?
Zoom the lens out juuust a cunt hair or two. Ah, there's the forest.
Internet becoming a house of cards. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sad times are a coming.
Re:Internet becoming a house of cards. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldnt call them sad times. Mankind only remembers the painful lessons (At best). It's far better to have a global internet outage now, when we can survive it, than tomorrow when our survival will fully depend on it.
We're due for a good reset and an economic and technological spring clean-up. The 'rona was supposed to bring this, but all it did was zombify even more companies.
Really? (Score:2)
Are we really thinking this latest of a spate of 'strange failures' really is just a coincidence or are we seeing attacks that are either
- failures, or
- successes that the company prefers to not acknowledge
>
Re: (Score:2)
There are cyberwarfare talks going on between the US and Russia right now, which may also not be a coincidence.
Russian oil pipelines (Score:2)
Same old story again (Score:3)
It does piss me off that we have lots of cloud providers, multiple redundant data centres, pathways but many organisations inadvertently still collectively send their traffic through a single gateway etc. which manages to knock it's entire operation offline : cloudflare, fastly, akamai etc.
Or the perennial favourite of shafting the DNS or Authentication systems.
Briefly??? (Score:2)
> briefly
The commonwealth bank was off the air to me for almost 8 hours. At this point I gave up and went to bed. 3 hours later, people were still reporting problems.
If 11 hours is 'briefly' how long would a long outage have to be?